Anthony looked at her, and the tightness in his chest loosened. She was here.
She wasalive. More than that, she wassafe.
“How long have I been unconscious?” he said, and his voice came out rough, unused.
“Six hours,” Lewis said. “The doctor stitched you…you were lucky. The blade missed anything vital.”
Anthony said nothing about that because he did not, at that moment, feel particularly lucky.
Lewis leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “Are you all right?”
“Well enough.”
Lewis nodded once, as if his conscience had been thoroughly soothed, and then his expression hardened. “Good. Then you can leave as soon as you’re able to walk.”
Anthony blinked at him. “What?”
“I want you away from my sister,” Lewis said, and his voice was flat, final. “You will not touch her. You will not speak to her. You will not come to this house. Do you understand me?”
Anthony did not answer. He was looking at Caroline, who had gone very still near the window. She was looking at the floor, her hands clenched in the fabric of her dress.
“Anthony.” Lewis’s voice sharpened. “Did you hear me?”
Anthony kept his eyes on Caroline. She still would not look at him. The exhaustion in her face, the shadows beneath her eyes—she had not slept. She had been here, waiting.
“Look at me when I’m speaking to you,” Lewis snapped.
At that command, something inside Anthony shifted. It was the thing that had been held in place for years by the careful management of tone and charm and the performance of easy friendship. Now, it cracked, and what came through was stripped of everything but truth.
“Shut up, Lewis.”
The silence in the room that followed those explosive words was absolute.
Lewis stared at him, his expression bewildered. “What…what did you just say to me?”
Anthony pushed himself up slowly, ignoring the sharp protest from his side. He met Lewis’s eyes with the flat, uncompromising directness of a man who had run out of patience. “I said shut up. You have no right to play the outraged brother with me. Not after what you nearly did.”
“What I nearly—” Lewis stood, his face flushing with anger. “You compromised my sister. You took her to boxing matches and gaming hells and God knows where else, and you think I have no right?—”
“You were going to marry her to Powell,” Anthony said, and his voice was cold, stripped of everything but fact. “A man who breaks women’s bones for sport. A man who would have destroyed her the moment you signed the contracts and walked away.”
Lewis went very still.
“You didn’t know him,” Anthony continued. “You barely vetted him. You looked at his title and estate and decided that it was enough. You paraded him in front of her like he was safe. Like, he was acceptable. Like her opinion on the matter was irrelevant. Not to mention I warned you about him.”
“I was trying to protect her,” Lewis said, his voice raw.
“You were trying to control her,” Anthony said. “Because you don’t trust her to make her own choices. You never have. You decided what she needed, and you didn’t ask her what she wanted, and if I hadn’t looked into Powell, if I hadn’t stopped it—” He paused. His jaw tightened. “She would be engaged to him right now. And in six months, she would be his wife. And you would never have known what you’d done to her.”
Lewis looked as though he had been struck. He opened his mouth, and soon closed it, because no words came.
Anthony turned to Caroline. She was looking at him now, her eyes wide and bright with something he could not name.
“I will stay away,” he said quietly. “If that is whatyouwant. Both of you. I will leave this house, and I will not come back, and you will never have to see me again.” He paused. “But do not ask me to apologize for keeping her safe. I won’t.”
Caroline said nothing. She was looking at him with an expression he could not read, her hands still clenched in her skirt.
Lewis sank back into his chair. He looked at Anthony, then at Caroline, then at the floor. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “I didn’t know. About Powell. I didn’t?—”